The personal nature of mobile devices requires that a new type of network be supported by these systems. Embedded systems also are increasingly in need of communication services for data transfer and diagnostic queries. Wide area and local area networks supported by Windows CE devices must share time with personal area networks—those networks that link devices over a short distance perhaps for only a short time. Windows CE supports personal area networking (PAN) over two transport technologies: infrared and radio frequency. The infrared transport conforms to the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) standard, while Windows CE uses the Bluetooth standard for radio-frequency networking.

Applications interact with both the IrDA communications stack and the Bluetooth stack using the Winsock API. The basics of Winsock were covered in Chapter 13. In this chapter, I’ll refer to Winsock in relation to how you need to program it differently for IrDA and Bluetooth. Let’s start by diving into the specifics of IrDA.